"Several portraits in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s “New Photography Acquisitions” show a more revealing side of the artist. Two show the only known depictions of her working. Others reveal the original architecture and furnishings of her homes at both Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú. The exhibition opens Friday, March 27, with photographs dating from 1917-1960s by some of the greatest photographers of the time: her husband Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, John Loengard, Arnold Newman and Tony Vaccaro."

September, 2014“The argument of the exhibition is that we can view Covarrubias in the same light as Rivera and Orozco and Siqueiros, but it requires looking at the work more broadly... He’s more like somebody like Pablo Picasso, who’s involved in a very large number of different creative arenas. It’s difficult to pin Covarrubias down because he was so good at so many creative endeavors. I think he was a kind of genius.”

"Papanikolas finds O’Keeffe’s Hawaiian paintings distinctive even apart from their specific imagery. 'I like to zero in on the paintings of the heliconia and the white bird of paradise as uniquely Hawaiian. Those two are super-outlandish flowers — big flowers, impressive when you see them in person. In White Bird of Paradise, there’s a palette of blue, white, and reflective pinks, and they make a really cool color-field background, rather than just be a traditional ‘botanical painting.’ The realism breaks down. She leaves out the mess that would be part of these plants in nature. It’s a very selective approach to depicting plants, such that sometimes the specimens are not immediately recognizable.'"

"At the height of their careers, both O’Keeffe and Adams
accepted commissions to work in the 50th state, an experience that challenged
the techniques of both as they reached to capture the essence of life in the
tropics."

"You know that feeling when your eyes really open up to a place and something awakens inside you? Like your heart? And it says: “This is where I belong.” That happens all the time here—even to people who've lived here all their lives. Most famously, it happened to Georgia O’Keeffe, who, on first arrival, said, 'Well, well, well! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me it was like this?'”

“All the stuff that we think about as distinctly O’Keeffe—the things that make her abstraction that’s derived from modern sources, her sense of importance of place, all of that starts in Lake George,” Hartley says. “That’s where she really fine-tunes and develops the things that later become so distinctly O’Keeffe.”

While staying with the Stieglitz family — a large and sometimes boisterous clan — O’Keeffe would hike, row, garden and generally take it all in. "I wish you could see the place here," she wrote in 1923 to the novelist Sherwood Anderson. "There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees. Sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces — it seems so perfect — but it is really lovely."

Once you've seen her paintings and toured the nearby Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center -- an endless treasure trove displaying her paints, pastels, brushes, colour samples, paintbox, rocks, shells and bones she collected, and some of her books -- enrich the experience by making a pilgrimage to the red clay desert and O'Keeffe's beloved Pedernal Mountain about an hour away.

Kastner notes that O’Keeffe was "amazed by the landscape, but there is also a really strong cultural fascination that she expresses immediately." In her first week in New Mexico, the artist bought a car, learned to drive, and went to Pueblo Indian dances. She became enchanted with crosses, adobe buildings, and bones, which would later appear in numerous paintings. "What’s clear is that she’s on fire with all this new cultural and visual stimulation."

The new behind-the-scenes tour will allow visitors to walk into the room behind the Black Patio Door -- a subject of many of her paintings -- that inspired O’Keeffe to purchase her Abiquiu home. This room was O’Keeffe’s workspace where she prepared her canvases.

After 40 years working for magazines, I didn’t know what I had left in me,” Leibovitz explained at the preview of Pilgrimage, which opened at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe on February 15. “To think I could go out and take a picture with no agenda except that I was moved to take it. There was a deep well in me, and I dug it up."

NYT Review: The Spirit of Cultural Objects, A Review of ‘Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico,’ at the Montclair Art Museum

January 4, 2013

When you look at O’Keeffe’s drawings and watercolors of katsina tithu, or at “Kachina” (1934), one of the most beautifully rendered oil paintings in the show (it also graces the catalog’s cover), you sense O'Keeffe attempting to depict the spirit of the figure in the same way she tried to capture the essence of a flower orlandscape.

Light edges over the darkened cliffs. Through the sage a woman walks silently, a stick in her hand to ward off snakes. She scans the mists in the far-off mountains. She picks up a stone and smooths it, touches the twisted branch of a piñon tree, toes a patch of lichen.

Painters who convey the tactile, or haptic, sense of land sometimes make a passionate battle out of the act of painting (think Van Gogh). But O’Keeffe didn’t struggle with strokes, surfaces or composition. She worked with an Olympian certainty, in which intellect and emotion seemed in perfect balance.